December 2008

December 30, 2008

In today’s New York Times Judith Warner has a column taking off from some thoughts about Revolutionary Road, and by coincidence she discusses some of the same points I’ve been thinking about.

In my earlier post, I guessed that the only reason anyone would want to watch the film version of Yates’s novel was “voyeurism”: a desire to observe the suffering of others with whom one has no personal or emotional connection, and to take pleasure in such observation. Warner comes up with another possible reason: we might want to view the novel (or the film) through the lenses of the social sciences. To an anthropologist or a sociologist, Revolutionary Road has something to say about the values and the social practices of a specific time in history. To a psychologist, Revolutionary Road exemplifies how -- in certain situations -- people generally think; in particular, it illustrates a kind of pathology that occurs under adverse conditions typical of the Eastern suburbs of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. And to a historian (my own preferred lens most of the time, if I had to pick from among this one group), it is, simply, evidence: one source among others, though an important source.

Of course there is an important distinction, a moral one, between the scientific worldview and that of the voyeur. It has to do with their motives. The scientist wants to learn about the world, both to increase humanity’s intellectual understanding and in order to make the world a better place: he has a place in society and a defined role.

The artist also studies people and writes about them: in this he is much like the scientist. And like the scientist, he as a defined role in society. However, the artist can’t claim to be benefiting the world in anything like the way the scientist does. Social science is the objective observation of other people, supporting the generation and elimination of theories about how people generally think or behave. The social scientist cannot have an emotional involvement with the people whom he studies (or his observations would fail to be objective), and the social scientist most definitely cannot be studying himself. When we enjoy art, however, we do get emotionally involved. And when we enjoy art most deeply, what we are “studying” is in a very real sense actually ourselves.

The late philosopher Richard Rorty, in his excellent book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, suggested dividing novels into two categories: those that provide readers pleasure of an aesthetic sort, and those that make readers aware of injustices in their own society. Drawing on the writings of the best novelists, critics, and philosophers of art, Rorty concluded that a novel can belong to one of those categories, or it can belong to the other category, but it never can belong to both.

Now, Warner suggests that the novel Revolutionary Road has value for us readers because it is the second kind of book. She may be right. However, the best critics and novelists in recent decades have praised it for the opposite reason: they say not only that Yates’s novel belongs in the first category, but that the book is especially notable because of the level of aesthetic craftsmanship its author displays by his having written it. I think it is probable that they are right. I think, if we cannot see why they have the opinions that they do, we are most likely missing some piece of information that they were using in order to come to the conclusions that they did.

But that’s the novel and I was discussing the film. There’s no doubt that the film promised us by the trailer (which again is all I have seen of it) looks very pretty. But that’s not all there is to a film. Certainly, most people, including me, do not go to the movies just to admire the cinematography -- any more than we go to the movies as anthropologists, considering Hollywood and its fans as providing us with case studies. We want a story and we want a kind of emotional involvement.

Say what you will about neoconservatives (I won’t contradict you), they provide employment to plenty of arts critics. Christopher Caldwell has a thoughtful piece, at the Weekly Standard, on Robert Venturi’s antimodernist postmodern manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas. Caldwell agrees with the first part of that epithet:

Josep Lluís Sert's ghastly Holyoke Center still occupies the spot in Harvard Square where Massachusetts Avenue's beautiful line of Victorian brick was ripped apart to make way for it in the 1960s. Gerhard Kallmann's Boston City Hall still sits like a Stalinist mausoleum on an empty, windswept plaza, for which dozens of ancient city blocks were razed.

No one will defend the new City Hall (though I’m not sure the Holyoke Center is really that bad), but I’m actually a fan of modernist architecture and always have been. Those stark, internally monotonous broad towers and sprawling glass boxes can be terribly beautiful.

Yes, it‘s true, “terribly” is appropriate here; their beauty is the sublimity of an enormous object that provokes just a little irrational fear: there is nothing pretty about them. They possess beauty in the same way that the smokestacks of a nuclear power plant do, seen from a few miles away. Or one of those fifty-foot Buddha statues. Or San Diego’s Mount Soledad cross. Their aesthetic power stems precisely from the sense of a small thing enlarged hundreds of times the appropriate size without a corresponding increase in detail.

The example of the Mount Soledad cross in particular suggests that the beauty of these structures depends on their exposure to the weather. It’s not just the building itself, but the contrast between it and the sky, the mountains, or the desert. Which means they do best when they stand isolated from others like themselves. There are few places where large conglomerations of them work truly well.

Postmodern buildings can look silly, with their overcolored stone veneers and their seventh-story portholes. However, probably mostly because the area was built up only in the past twenty or so years, the stretch along Boston's Central Artery has a bunch of glass-and-steel postmodernist towers that, as a group, are really very pretty.

December 24, 2008

One of the disadvantages of blogging is the need to write and publish very quickly. Sometimes you say something you wish you’d worded differently. The same thing is true of live radio.

... Although we’re a secular country, created by a gang of guys. Remember there were no women in those days.... No women anywhere to be seen. There were no women. Women don’t come along until the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 when women finally get the vote. Or maybe the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 when they gathered and said we must get the vote ...

That’s an English professor talking (Jay Parini discussing his new book, Books That Changed America, with Tom Ashbrook of "On Point"). Well -- no harm, no foul. We know what he means.

December 23, 2008

I put up an earlier post concerning the horrible looking trailer for Revolutionary Road; Adelle Waldman at The New Republic now has a relatively lengthy, typically sensitive review of the novel itself. She suggests to me at least that the trailer is unrepresentative, if not the film itself, which she doesn’t mention. As it’s The New Republic, the review is focused on moral and psychological concerns, and on what the book says about the author almost to the exclusion of what it has to offer the reader. I’m not saying I don’t like it; but it’s a little old-fashioned. It isn’t surprising they would like Revolutionary Road. It sounds like that kind of novel.

She does emphasize that the novel’s major note is bleakness, but sees a lot more nuance and real depth. She certainly found some interesting dialogue:

April decides that "it"--the whole dreary shebang of suburban family life--is her fault. "I put the whole burden ...on you," she says to Frank. "It was like saying if you want this baby, it's going to be All Your Responsibility. You're going to have to turn yourself inside out to provide for us. You'll have to give up any idea of being anything in the world but a father." [this men’s movement sounding stuff ought to draw in some Internet readers]

April's plan is riddled with holes, something even the affable drunkard who shares a cubicle with Frank can see. (As he says to Frank over lunch, "Assuming there is a true vocation lurking in wait for you, don't you think you'd be as apt to discover it here as there?")

Dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone who can write. (James Wood says Yates was known as, not only “a writer’s writer,” but as “a writer’s writer’s writer." Dialogue that’s not necessarily sparklingly naturalistic, though. Yates sounds a little like a guy who’s read too much Freud.

So by all means, the novel sounds like it’s well worth reading. (I’ll put it on my list.) Whether the dialogue of a writer’s writer’s writer can translate successfully to the screen is another question.

December 21, 2008

The Atlantic has finally made it easy to find its "Dispatches," and published one of Todd Gitlin's post-election essays there. If they published things like this on a regular basis, I might not have let my subscription lapse last month.

With the country thrashing around and an incoming president as yet largely untested, hopes hearken backwards, converging on memories—and fantasies—of a time in the previous century when, in the wake of a catastrophic and self-destroying presidency, history met legend under the sign of a vague but promising phrase (what exactly was a “New Deal” anyway?), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt rushed to pull rabbits out of a hat, and the spirit of confidence—the refusal of fear—was part of the rebuttal to fear. No sooner was Obama elected than Time magazine’s cover offered a Photoshopped Barack Obama in fedora and rimless glasses, grinning big, cigarette holder in place, hand on convertible steering wheel, with the tag-line: “The New New Deal.” No surprise, Obama’s run-up to “Change” sends many a political analyst to accounts of FDR’S first Hundred Days in office, when Americans first clamped capital letters onto the phrase. Obama himself sounded more than a little like FDR when he told Steve Croft on “60 Minutes”: “My interest is in finding something that works.”

On the surface, at least, the resemblance is plain in both temperament and style. Heaps of histories and biographies make clear that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an improvisation artist, and the conventionality of the observation does not erase its accuracy.

Fast Company has more on Amar Bhide's book The Venturesome Economy. A lot of interesting points. Just a few:

In claiming that those who have sounded alarms about U.S. competitiveness are “techno-fetishists or techno-nationalists,” Bhidé also miscasts their message by insinuating that they “fear catch-up” by other countries.But that’s a red herring; that camp does not fear catch-up if other nations achieve it through venturesome consumption, technological superiority, or old-fashioned market competition, what it opposes is when nations use protectionist trade strategies to gain a competitive advantage over U.S. firms by shifting the cost equation, taking technology without paying for it, or blocking or limiting U.S. firm’s access to their markets.It fears more that the United States has yet to truly grasp the serious threat posed by foreign economies and their companies, not just through their genuine technical strengths and attractive products in many cases, but also illegitimate approaches that erect unfair or protectionist trade policies that systematically disadvantage foreign competition.

...

The notion that U.S. firms may offshore their manufacturing (and jobs), but that the higher-valued added (and thus higher-paying) research, design, and management jobs will remain in the U.S. is becoming increasingly inverted.Intel’s recent decision to locate a $4 billion manufacturing plant near its R&D center in Israel (so the manufacturing facility could be close to its R&D site that spawned the innovation) shows that an economy that initially controls R&D and manufacturing can lose the value-added first from manufacturing, and then R&D.In other words, economies can use a branch-plant innovation approach to quickly become powerful competitors and migrate up the value curve to rapidly achieve competitiveness in high-value added industries, when once they were thought only to be low-skill, low-cost manufacturing centers.

...

But in the new global economy, knowledge is increasingly the major factor of production (as opposed to the tangible capital embodied in machinery, laborers, and financial capital that characterized the old economy).It is embedded in organizations and if organizations die so too does a significant amount of knowledge.Thus, losing international competitions in knowledge-based industries (whether through other countries’ interventionist policies or the superiority of their firms) means losing much more than just the firms; it means losing the value from these dispersed pieces of value now represented by unemployed workers and under-utilized suppliers.

December 17, 2008

Yvonne Abraham is one of the Boston Globe’s regular columnists. Today she is writing about the commenters on the Globe’s website -- the people who write responses to articles in the daily paper, in its online version. There are some very nasty things that have been posted about innocent people who found themselves the subjects of amusing or heart-rending human-interest stories.

It is difficult to imagine that anybody would say those things in any other forum. There is something about not being able to see the people you are talking about, specific to the Internet, that brings out some people’s hidden desire to be aggressive. To go to the effort of writing a letter to the editor, you have to care quite a lot about the subject -- or else have fewer inhibitions against saying whatever’s on your mind than most people have. To go to the effort of writing a comment on an article that‘s online, you don’t have to make that much effort. To be sure, newspapers have always received their share of crazy letters, and reporters themselves receive lots of nutty mail. But the newspaper always acted as an intermediary, and absorbed the attacks before the people they wrote about ever heard about them. Only the reporters knew. Now, with the Internet, the audience is immensely larger, and there is no editor -- not in the physical infrastructure that stores and relays the messages, and (too often) not in the minds of those who write in.

December 16, 2008

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has a post up about the Wyeth ghostwriting miniscandal as it relates to academic ethical standards. It brings up an interesting question about different requirements made by different professional groups, not only about authorship and credit, but about consequences and liability.

Spokesperson for the pharmaceutical manufacturer:

The authors of the articles in question, none of whom were paid, exercised substantive editorial control over the content of the articles and had the final say, in all respects, over the content.

Senator Charles E. Grassley:

Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, that can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe drugs that may not work and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling.

Professor Quiggin:

In reality, having someone write articles for you amounts to not doing the job for which, as an academic, you are paid and, if the articles are sufficiently numerous and well-placed, promoted.

The integrity ofthe published record of scientific research depends not only on the validity of the science but also on honesty in authorship. Editors and readers need to be confident that authors have undertaken the work described and have ensured that the manuscript accurately reflects their work, irrespective of whether they took the lead in writing or sought assistance from a medicalwriter. The scientific record is distorted if the primary purpose of an article is to persuade readers in favor of a special interest, rather than to inform and educate, and this purpose is concealed.

A professor whom I won’t name, in order to protect her reputation and that of the institution with which she is associated:

It kind of makes me laugh that with what goes on in the Senate, the senator’s worried that something’s ghostwritten. I mean, give me a break.

December 14, 2008

I haven’t seen the new film Revolutionary Road. I’ve only seen the trailer that was included in some recent DVD‘s, and read reviews by Christopher Hitchens and James Wood of the 1960s novel it’s based on. The book reviews begin to explain why the movie the trailer promises us is so grim and unwatchable. (As I posted earlier, I intend to review reviews and trailers when I feel like it.)

The novel is a classic of its era, one of several that condemn the soullessness of the then-new suburbs. The main characters start out as, kind of, bohemians, living in the city with other bohemians; they move to the suburbs because that’s what you do; they are miserable; and there’s nothing they can do about it. It is inevitable. It is, in another key, the one-time cliché that educated young people start out as liberals, then later get mugged by reality and turn into neoconservatives.

But in this adaptation of a forty-five year old book, there is no politics.

Christopher Hitchens quotes from the novel in his Atlantic review:

“How do you like this Oppenheimer business?” one of them would demand, and the others would fight for the floor with revolutionary zeal.

The scene puts us in the same world as Lionel Trilling's postcommunist novel The Middle of the Journey, a world where political commitment is assumed, as much as Woody Allen's "Dissentary" joke in Annie Hall. By 2008, the background has leached out. Alvie Singer's boredom with political solutions has become acceptance that there are no personal solutions either.

It’s hard to imagine middle-aged married suburbanites would have any interest in buying tickets to this movie, but middle-aged married suburbanites don’t go to the movies anymore. It seems designed to appeal to people who appreciate art more than the social values of family and community: maybe young people, who make up the lion’s share of moviegoers. But why would they want to watch a movie about other people’s hopelessness?

If there were politics involved, you could explain it. It would then seem sympathetic to their suffering, hopeful about the possibility of circumstances' someday being changed. Instead, it appears voyeuristic: an opportunity for moviegoers to remind themselves of their superiority.

UPDATE: David Denby has a review of the movie in the current New Yorker. I guess this was probably available on the web site before the weekend, but I only read it yesterday in the print edition.

December 12, 2008

Sometimes dragging dark things out into the light allows us to laugh as how ridiculous they are. To this day when I play “The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane,” it’s mostly taken as comedy, but it’s composed of feelings and events I was scared to tell people about before I’d put them into song form. I was willing to expose my thoughts and feelings more than most, practically violating my own privacy, and that was part of the point for me.

Jeffrey Lewis raises the question of authorial intention and interpretation in an interesting way. The act of performing a song before an audience changes its meaning -- he learns more about himself by exposing himself to the judgment of others and learning from them more mature ways of understanding what he wrote.

That's something that had never occurred to me. It's interesting, and important for a writer, to know how other people will read what he or she wrote. But when someone tells me what I wrote meant something different to them than it did to me, my reaction is most often to revise the writing to make it mean what I do.

Before we interpret a novel or poem, I'd think we'd want to know what the writer had in mind when he or she started to write it. However, if most good writers think as Lewis does, we wouldn't need to know this, because the reader would determine the text's meaning, not the author.

"Bianca Steele" is as I intend to explain in my profile if I ever get around to setting a profile up, a pseudonym. Here is a poem I've posted elsewhere under a different name. (If you can find the original, you are using a different search engine than I am.)

When we read something that we can't explain,We don’t assume it’s wrong — then we'd lack tact.We don’t pick out the errors, don’t complain,But ask if he can show us what we’ve lacked,And so think of him and us as in compactTo do one thing, on one team, as it were,So of one mind, we need not to confer.

But on occasion something shows its faceThat we just cannot fit into our scheme.We wouldn't say it’s bad; it’s that . . . the placeAnd time won’t match . . . but all the same,It's wonderful, and we just cannot seemTo let such things slide past us unrecorded.(So long, of course, that our praisees are well-sorted.)

So here we will run through it yet again,Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and the next,Until we get it right. So, men:Start your engines, get straight your files, line upYour coffee cups and pens, and sit up straight!Repeat after me, slowly, so you'll catchThe nuances, and the references to fetch.

The proper way’s quite simple: Do no harm,Do nothing you’d not want be done to you,To every soul, unfailingly, be warm,Do everything you’d be expected to.If you respect us, we’ll respect you, too,In quite the same way. And, so, now, let's start,But this time: with a little bit of heart.

I realize now it reads in a slower tempo than I initially heard it in. I heard the last line, for example, as "a little bit of you makes me your man." The whole thing should be fast, like Shakespeare, not slow like T.S. Eliot.

December 10, 2008

There's been a lot of complaining on the 'Net about Joan Didion's pro-irony, anti-"Obama myth" speech/essay. Scott Kaufman at Acephalous has a nice analysis of Didion's approach.

Kaufman points out that Didion's purpose in writing is to describe the errors in most people's thinking. Her intention is to encourage more rigorous thought, more serious self-questioning, refusal to take any too-easily arrived-at position.

So, she says, most people "take at face value" what the McCain camp said publicly about their having performed an "exhaustive vetting" of their vice-presidential candidate. When they read Didion's essay, wondering whether what she writes is true, they will begin to question whether they had been wrong after all. They will realize that "tak[ing] at face value" is only one option among others. They will ask themselves whether that is the best approach, and they will look for other options, compare, analyze, and choose the best one.

Didion intends to demonstrate her readers' mistake. But "most people" do not read the New York Review of Books. It is impossible for her to educate "most people" by means of publishing essays in the NYRB. Moreover, most people don't follow the campaign as closely as she needs them to, in order for her theory to make sense. It's only the "hi info" people -- who are, again, likely to be NYRB readers -- who even know what she's talking about.

The reasonable thing to do, everybody knows, is to buy low and sell high. And that's what is going on here. She is shopping "the American people" to "the ideal NYRB reader." The idea that the people Didion says she would like to educate are going to be changed by the kind of writing she does -- that is nothing more than pie in the sky.

December 09, 2008

One of the worst things you can say to someone in a university is that their work or their ideas are the same as something promoted in Nazi Germany. (Unlike the Internet, in academia there is nothing like Godwin's Law. Such accusations are perfectly well within bounds.) The idea that what the Nazis called "science" was altogether unlike what we know to be science is, thus, important to maintain. Recently, in the London Telegraph, historian Richard Evans argues that this is not the case. In fact, he says, when he looked into the most heinous, disreputable experiments German scientists carried out in the National Socialist era, he found that they were astonishingly "similar in form, if not content, . . . to the research of today."

He did find some differences. This is not surprising. However, it does not necessarily reflect moral differences between Germany's culture and society under Nazism and the rest of the world. Many of the institutions we take for granted simply did not exist until after the Second World War. Evans appears to focus on peer review as the reliable sign of decent research. He correctly notes that one characteristic of Nazi medicine was to try to improve the average level of healthiness in society -- not only by studying very healthy people in order to discover the factors that contribute to their good health -- but also by trying to eliminate the people on the low end of the healthiness scale. What is truly revolting about, for example, Mengele's experiments, however, was their inattention to any kind of ethics around the study of human subjects -- the protocols surrounding which were instituted after the war, in large part as a direct result of those abuses.

It is also not surprising that in most respects German science at the time should have greatly resembled science in other Western nations. Germany was in a sense actually the hub of scientific research at the time. Many discoveries were made in other countries, but they were often developed to their full extent only in Germany. It is important to remember to what extent Western-style science has always been an international activity.

There is a great desire to divide science into "good" science that evil people like Nazis somehow could not even have contemplated, and "bad" science that can be recognized at first glance. A look at the historical sources, unfortunately, shows unequivocally that such a division is impossible.